Contextual variability during speech-in-speech recognition

This study examined the influence of background language
variation on speech recognition. English listeners performed an English
sentence recognition task in either “pure” background conditions in
which all trials had either English or Dutch background babble or in
mixed background conditions in which the background language varied
across trials (i.e., a mix of English and Dutch or one of these
background languages mixed with quiet trials). This design allowed the
authors to compare performance on identical trials across pure and
mixed conditions. The data reveal that speech-in-speech recognition is
sensitive to contextual variation in terms of the target-background
language (mis)match depending on the relative ease/difficulty of the test
trials in relation to the surrounding trials.